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Wednesday, March 3, 2010

Bookmahk Smaht!

A pause to touch on productivity and planning. I have gained soooo much from transitioning to social bookmarking tools, as opposed to adding bookmarks within your browser. Social bookmarking, most notably through Diigo or Delicious, allows you to do the following:

Use a toolbar "bookmarklet" to seamlessly add and annotate a link, then return to the site of interest.

"Tag" sites with multiple category names (e.g. "interactive," "science," "textstructure," "grade4"), rather than the single category folder you can set up on your browser.

View your bookmarks in your web-based account from any browser or computer.

Find more sites by searching within your network or by tag (e.g. look for sites tagged by users as "interactive" and "plants" to find a site for 2nd graders studying plants)

So try one of these social bookmarking sites and embrace your organized and categorical self, as all SLPs should. Don't fear the "social" aspect, it's not going to steal your time away. It's simply some limited networking that benefits you by viewing what others are bookmarking. Social bookmarking could be considered a consultation activity; you can identify and share sites with teachers or TAs that would be beneficial for your students to review outside of your sessions.

Here are two demos of the most popular bookmarking sites. I started with delicious, so there I stay, primarily. Diigo has some more functionality in allowing you to highlight and annotate sites, receive email blasts if you belong to an interest group, and easily set up lists for sharing.